http://jais.aisnet.org/HealthCareIT.asp
CALL FOR PAPERS: Special Issue on Health Care IT: Process… People and Patients
Guest Editors
Fay Cobb Payton, Fay_payton@ncsu.edu
Guy Pare, guy.pare@hec.ca
Madhu Reddy, mreddy@ist.psu.edu
Cynthia LeRouge, lerougec@slu.edu
Effectiveness and efficiency of Health Care Information and Management Systems (HIS) will become one of the main challenges in health care in the next decade. According to the World Health Organization (WHO, 2006), significant improvements are being made in healthcare due to information and communication technologies (ICT). eHealth innovations like electronic health records, computer-assisted prescription systems and clinical databases are transforming health today, and hold even greater promise for the future. ICT’s support clinical care, patient education, facilitates scientific advancement of the field, and improves the work flow of various functions in the healthcare. Success in utilizing these systems is predicated on such issues as understanding the wide array of users and their unique needs while developing systems, investigating, documenting and analyzing the impact of eHealth on the users and the broader community of service providers and promoting better understanding of the impact of better information on health service outcomes by disseminating information and improving accessibility to health care information.
The HIS domain is intrinsically interdisciplinary, and the Information Systems (IS) community has a key role in its advancement. The IS discipline is well positioned to conduct research that contributes toward the health care goals of improving the capabilities of physicians, clinical staff, health care consumers and public health workers by systematically investigating the impact of context on existing IS theories and models as they relate to health care issues. In addition, the nuances in the health care context provide a rich environment from which to develop new theory as well as extend the existing IS theories (Chiasson and Davidson, 2007). Yet, little research in top-tier IS journals currently is directed toward Health Care Information and Management Systems (HIS). Existing health care and medical informatics journals make valuable contributions to advancing the design and use of ICT in the health care context. In particular. they have served well in documenting existing practices and experiences and results of the use of technology but generally they do not contribute to significant theory building and in particular, formulation of new IS theories. Applying strong theoretical perspectives into existing and emerging electronic practices of HIS will facilitate the opening of the black box of technology and leading to a better understanding of how, why and under what circumstances theory can guide the implementation, use and acceptance of ICTs in the health care context. Furthermore, new theories are needed in accounting for emerging and new phenomena in these environments and to inform IS theory development in general.
In this special issue JAIS seeks to address the future research challenges of HIS through application and extension of IS and related theories. This special issue will give particular consideration to articles that integrate literatures, approaches, and findings related to technology in health care across related disciplines. To this end the special issue will solicit high quality Healthcare-IS papers that apply and extend theory within and across information systems, sociology, health informatics, medicine, health policy research, health economics and other fields that are rarely bridged in published studies. We seek open dialogue and knowledge sharing among these disciplines. Recent special issues in leading IS journals such as ISR (http://www.informs.org/site/ISR/article.php?id=124) address some health informatics topics. By advocating multi-disciplinary and integrated approach, the special issue hopes to expand and draw upon these studies by carefully incorporating ideas and theories from related disciplines. To facilitate this integrated perspective, the editorial board of this special issue represents researchers from multiple disciplines that have an interest in health information systems. Therefore, each submitted paper will be subjected to a review by a review panel composing of scholars from information system and other related disciplines, when appropriate.
Papers can address any issue related to users, design, acceptance, use, workflow, organizational structure, evaluation, cost benefits, and diffusion of HIS. The issue also solicits papers that investigate human behaviours toward the use of information technology within a health care environment, benefits and impacts of information technology, organizational change management and human and ethical concerns related to into information technology projects in health care. Theory development using techniques such as grounded theory are welcome as well as papers that advance and offer new insights into existing theories such as those in the compendium of theories used in IS research ( see e.g. at http://www.istheory.yorku.ca/). HIS related theoretical pursuits can include, but are not limited to the following:
Regional and Community Health Information Networks
Telemedicine and Tele-Applications
Socio-technical aspects of HIS
Electronic Medical Records
Mobile Devices and Ubiquitous Computing
Data Quality and Management of Clinical Data
HIS Technology Innovations in a Global Context
Use of Technology to Address Public Health and Policy
Health Care Website Assessment and Effectiveness
Consumer Centric Design of Home Health Innovations
Patient-centered applications impacting patient/physician interaction
HIS for patient support and social inclusion
Human-Computer Interaction and Usability Issues in HIS
The manuscripts can utilize diverse research approaches, including conceptual or theoretical argument as well as rigorous empirical work that advance or propose theory using qualitative and/or quantitative research methods (including case studies and surveys). All contributions will be subjected to a double-blind review process in line with JAIS editorial policies.
By collaborating with scholars coming from multiple organizations, the special issue seeks also to capture the interest of national and international health care IS scholars from a myriad of domains, including medical schools, nursing, social sciences, informatics, public policy, communications, etc. Therefore, the AIS Special Interest Group on Healthcare ( http://www.aissighealth.com/wordpress/?page_id=2), American Medical Informatics Association’s People and Organizational Issues (POI) Workgroup ( http://www.amia.org/mbrcenter/wg/poi/index.asp), International Medical Informatics Association’s Organizational and Social Issues Workgroup ( http://www.imia.org/Action.Lasso?-Response=WG_profile.html&-Search=Action&-Table=CGI&-MaxRecords=1&-SkipRecords=12&-Database=organizations&-SortField=workgroup_SIG&-SortOrder=ascending&type=WGSIG) and IEEE Medical Technology Workgroup (http://www.ieeeusa.org/volunteers/committees/mtpc/) have agreed to serve as sponsors of this special issue and will provide excellent sources for paper submissions and reviewers.
The topics appropriate for the submission will be discussed at ECIS 2008 in Galway during SIG-Health sponsored activities. POI and IEEE will promote the special issue via their organizational websites and ongoing activities, such as tele-meetings. The potential submissions can be prepared by utilizing the AMCIS 2008 SIG-Health track in Toronto which consists of 7 mini tracks. The mini track chairs will be asked to select conference papers that could be further developed for consideration in this special issue. During the annual SIG-Health meeting at AMCIS 2008, this call will be discussed and potential paper submissions will be discussed. Potential authors are invited to attend this meeting.
Authors are strongly encouraged to contact the special issue editors via e-mail to ascertain fit of their work with the special issue in advance of the submission deadline. Interested authors should submit a one-page abstract of their proposed paper to Fay Cobb Payton at fay_payton@ncsu.edu by August 1, 2009. Full-paper submissions should be between 4000-6000 words in length. Submissions should include a separate title page giving the names and addresses of the authors. Manuscripts must be sent electronically to fay_payton@ncsu.edu, together with 1-5 keywords and an abstract of approximately 150-200 words. Please check the website at http://jais.aisnet.org/format.asp for author guidelines including format and style.
Papers will receive an initial screening, and only those papers that are deemed to have a reasonable chance of acceptance in an accelerated review process will remain under consideration.
IMPORTANT DEADLINES AMCIS 2008 SIG-Health Annual Meeting will discuss Special issue and expectations
August 2009 Abstract Deadline
January 15, 2010 Final submissions
April 30, 2010 Review decisions
August 1, 2010 Revised papers due
October 2010 Notification of acceptance
December 2010 Camera ready submission
Editorial board of the special issue:
Ronald Spanjers, Catharina Hospital – Netherlands
Vance Wilson, The University of Toledo
Helen Richardson, University of Salford
Nilmini Wickramasinghe, Illinois Institute of Technology
Bonnie Kaplan, Yale University
Mike Chiasson, Lancaster University
Philip Musa, University of Alabama-Birmingham
Monica Garfield, Bentley College
Bengisu Tulu, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Ton Spil, BBT University of Twente, The Netherlands
Awie Leonard, University of Pretoria, South Africa
Sharon Tan, The National University of Singapore
Francis Lau, University of Victoria, BC, Canada
Samir Chatterjee, Claremont Graduate University
Donal Flynn, University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology
Eric Monteiro, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Pascale Lehoux, University of Montreal, Canada
Nelson King, American University of Beirut
Wendy Currie, University of Warwick
Patrick Y.K. Chau, The University of Hong Kong
References
Chiasson, M. W., & Davidson, E. (2004). Pushing the contextual envelope: Developing and diffusing IS theory for health information systems research. Information and Organization, 14(3), 155-188.
_________________
Ann Fruhling, PhD
afruhling@unomaha.edu
Research Director for STATPack,
www.statpack.org
Director, Center for Public Health Informatics at the University of Nebraska at Omaha